I see this form of thought here a lot. The general gist of it is "well, everyone else likes this so you should be okay with it too". Usually the person arguin

I see this form of thought here a lot. The general gist of it is "well, everyone else likes this so you should be okay with it too". Usually the person arguing in that direction is one of "everyone else". I've never found it super convincing. Personally, I don't actually think that the technical discourse here is super great- occasionally I see things from highly knowledgeable folks, but a lot of the time it's just hacks out a hackin. HN is a forum run by venture capitalists and folks who are tied to that either aspirationally or professionally. I get a lot of information about how that group of folks thinks from this site, and I find it helpful in understanding their affect on the world I live in. You're welcome to have whatever preferences you have for the site, but it's not how I have been interacting with it for the last decade. To the point about flagging, I am always surprised how willing folks are to believe that every other social media algo is gamed, but just assumed that there is no manipulation going on with their own media consumption. I mean, go write a bot to flag stuff using ghost accounts, I don't care- I get my "HN front page" from a set of search terms, which will show a lot of dead and flagged content. It's pretty trivial to see what happens if you're looking to know that kind of thing, and other folks have written at least two tracking systems I know of for killed HN content. I can totally buy that the reality of empire and its internal contradictions are uncomfortable enough for the tech bros that seem to make up the most of the site. The idea that they reflexively repress anything "political" sounds reasonable. That doesn't seem like a great premise, but I buy it better than the idea that I should be beholden to that same ideal in my use of the site.